Adobe starts shipping Creative Suite 4

Adobe Systems announced late Tuesday that it had begun shipping Creative Suite 4, its bundle of professional graphics and media applications. The launch, which Adobe described as the largest in the company’s history, includes updated versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Contribute, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Soundbooth, OnLocation, and Encore. Four different flavors of the suite are available with prices ranging from $1,699 to $2,499. Adobe continues to improve integration among the applications.

After Effects, for example, can import Photoshop 3D layers and export content directly into Flash. Options for working with high-definition video and mobile content expand too, with support for the latest formats as well as for making Adobe AIR applications.Adobe also started distributing new version of Flash Player 10. This version of Flash, which Adobe launched in a beta version in May, includes support for custom filters and special effects, native 3D transformation and animation, advanced audio processing and GPU hardware acceleration, Adobe said. It also includes a new text engine aimed at providing designers and developers with more text layout options.

OpenOffice 3.0 released, crashed server

OpenOffice may not have got the headlines it deserves in the past, but that suddenly looks to have changed… With today’s release of OpenOffice 3, developer Sun Microsystems has seen download demand for the suite reach such levels it has been forced to run a stripped down site to avoid the thing going under. Consequently all that currently remains of openoffice.org is a text only page with download links (it’s tough being popular). This popularity is looking deserved too with OfficeOffice 3 running on Windows, Linux RPM, Linux DEB, Solaris x86, Solaris SPARC and Intel based Mac OS X Mac OSX PPC OSes making it the most platform friendly office suite out there.

So what do we get this time around? In truth the benefits are more centred around improving functionality than beautification (traditionally the way with ‘OOo’) and to this end the suite takes a major step forward with a newbie-friendly smart start page (pictured) and crucially full support for Microsoft Office’s new xml based file formats including docx, xlsx and pptx. Other notable highlights include Writer’s ability to now display multiple pages at once (great for larger monitors) while the Calc spreadsheet has seen its 256 column limit expanded to over 1,000 and there are improved network collaboration tools as well. Meanwhile OpenOffice’s famed high speed, low impact performance is claimed to be better than ever.